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Half a century ago, 50 Years of the Tavistock Clinic (Dicks, 1970) was published. As the author wrote then:
The “Tavi” has a long record of continuous innovation. (It) exists to nourish the new, not to dispense the mixture as before. Without new life and creation, we would lose our place as a centre of excellence. We have had our past. Now let us make … history! (p. 327)
The Tavistock Century: 2020 Vision marks the centenary of the Tavistock Clinic, and demonstrates how the aspiration in those words has been realised—more than Dicks could ever have imagined. This book is nothing less than a historic document that maps out the continuing creation and development of both an extraordinary range of care services made available to people in psychological need, and of teaching and consultancy services for the various practitioners who work with those people.
The book's forty-five chapters describe the Tavistock's work over the past fifty years. Many are written in a quite personal way by the staff members who initiated the new service or who were involved with it, meaning the book has an intimate and human “face”. This is a reflection of the story of the Tavistock, which has always leant heavily on the creativity of its staff, and its management, many of whom were innovators and became leaders in their field.
The book opens with a number of chapters addressing the Tavistock legacy. These include discussions of the place of the clinic and its work in the wider community, the core Tavistock tradition of addressing the interplay between psychological and social dimensions, the place of research, the emphasis on “infant observation” as a central learning experience, and the development of teaching, training, leadership, and consultancy services.
In the first chapter, Anton Obholzer writes about the fact that working with distressed, disturbed, and sometimes mentally ill adults, children, couples, and families often “drives us to despair and into dark and seemingly hopeless places”